Restarts have been very good for the past 5 or 6 months. When there are no restarts the blocks get long in the teeth..
There's a name for this in psychology, where you associate one action with another and draw a connection between them. I forget what it is called or the specifics of it, but I remember one point of discussion was that while one tends to notice that (it appears) if A happens then B happens, the human brain is very good at keeping track of this. For example, "Every time I drive down street X all the traffic lights are red." What the human brain doesn't keep track of, however, is all the times that A
did not happen, but B happened any way. In reality you drive down street X all the time and the lights are green, but your brain only makes a point of when they are red.
It would be interesting to see how many blocks are solved immediately following a restart vs. no restart. Of course there's no causation here, but it would still be interesting to see the numbers just for the sake of discussion.
Or maybe it's not the restart that appears to affect the pool, maybe it's just Kano posting that he restarted the pool that does it...
That's correct. Its a mental perception Fallacy. In fact, only if there is an issue with the pool every time and restarting solve it, then would there actually be a raise in odds of finding a block. We found hundreds of blocks. Did we need a restart to find them? No.
Meanwhile we noticed that a couples of time, when we got a restart, a block happened! We didn't make the assumption that "we didn't restart and we got a block, so restart are bad" so why would you do the opposite?
Its just so happen that the odds of finding a block at any time is reasonably high, thus its bound to happen shortly after restarts, just normal odds.
Understanding this does not make me a troll, i'm just objectively observing the pool's performance and we're above average, whereas we would be under average if there was a problem with the pool that was only fixed by repeatedly restarting, since Kano has NOT been restarting on demand.